The CJO adressed ecstatic crowds in Baltimore, MD, last night.
Dear Friends, and fellow Northeasterners,
I’m here to start off my campaign, to write the first sentence of a beautiful story with you. Now, a great deal can be said about the opening sentence in literature. There’s a quite well-known lecture on the opening sentence by the great Dutch Writer WF Hermans. It’s not a very good lecture, mind you. More of a catalogue of not completely failed examples of the genre than a critical survey. It still has the merit of pointing our attention to the single greatest opening sentence in Dutch Literature, the first line of Nescio’s De Uitvreter (a good translation might be The Loafer): ‘With the exception of that man who thought that the Sarpahtistraat in Amsterdam was the most beautiful place in Europe, I have never known another person as remarkable as the Loafer.’ A perfect example of the genre, evoking a world stretching out behind those words, reverberating with a host of unspecified details.
This is what constitutes to my mind the strength of a good opening sentence: it says more than it appears to do, much like a Joseph Conrad novel. One could in that context point to perhaps the most celebrated opening line in 20th Century English Language literature, from Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers: ‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’ I’d have to disagree, however, Burgess’ sentence is nothing but an exercise in outrageousness; a laudable project in itself, but not what grants an opening sentence a special, deeper dimension. It falls short because it is too self-conscious, too obviously nothing but a joke.
It now also occurs to me that the most famous opening sentence in all of Dutch literature is not Nescio’s (and he did have some other good ones ‘Boys we were, but nice boys’ is positively famous), but the superficially uninteresting: ‘I’m a trader in coffee and I live in the Lauriergracht, No. 37’ Here we are presented with what we will come to see as a quite comprehensive description of Batavus Droogstoppel, one of the three narrators in Multatuli’s Max Havelaar. The sentence may not appear very informative at first, but as the novel progresses it gains meaning. It’s the sort of opening sentence that rewards re-reading.
We now have two characteristics of the good opening sentence: it hints at something not said, and it does so in a way that at the same time conveys information about what will be said a bit further on. If we add the obvious demand of tension, of economy, than we wind up with a template for the truly great opening sentence, the ‘Call me Ishmael’ type of opener. It’s fair to say that all that came before, was but a run-up to the point I’d like to make: that I know of no other opening sentence in all of world literature that can stand besides Céline’s little pearl of perfection in Mort à Credit: ‘Nous voici encore seuls’. Four words, yet impossible to translate without sacrificing 90% or more of what makes this such an arresting opening. ‘Here we are, still alone’? No, that won’t do. That won’t do at all.
There’s a final type of opening sentence that needs addressing: the general truth. ‘All happy families are alike,…’, or its ironic pendant Austen’s ‘truth universally acknowledged’. This is the opening sentence that is the most overrated, in my opinion. Universal truths rarely transcend the level of the amusing quip, the easy inversion, or, worst of all, the truism. They are quotable, yes, but they’re also a bad habit.
Thank you, and God Bless Atlasia!
Endorsed.
